Serendipity (Southern Comfort) (32 page)

“I’ll be right back.”

“What?  Oh.  Water.”  She grabbed his hand as he straightened.   “Jordan.  Don’t bother.  I’m feeling much better now.”

He could see that she was.  Her color had come back – a little high, in his opinion – but it was better than the death-warmed-over look of a moment ago.

“Ah…”  Ava brushed at an ink stain on her scrubs.  “Wow.  Let me just say, how embarrassing.”  Her eyes lifted to his, chagrinned.  “Not the way you care to be greeted, I’m sure.”  And the chagrin shifted to sympathetic.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t even ask… your friend?”

“Positive identification was made this morning.” 

“I’m so sorry, Jordan.” 

So was he.  And having just come from talking to Leslie’s mother, was feeling bruised.  And admitted he’d come by because he needed, simply needed, to see Ava. “You know, I’ve spent the past several days dealing with blow after blow.  I’m… beaten, just at the moment.  So I was wondering,” he squatted in front of her chair, brushed a loose strand of that dark hair from her face.  “I was wondering if we could go back to my place – or your place.  Or a park bench.  I don’t care – and just sleep together.  Or if you wouldn’t mind lying with me while I sleep.   I’m exhausted, Ava. But I have this overwhelming need to feel you next to me.”

If she hadn’t already done so, Ava thought she would have fallen for him right then.  She studied his tired – wounded – eyes, and felt her heart turn over. 

It would be best for both of them if she cut him loose.  Safer for them, anyhow.

But not yet.  Not when he’d just handed her a piece of himself and asked her to take care of it.  “Let me close up,” she murmured and leaned forward to kiss his head.  “Then we can go – my place, your place, whatever.  I’ll give you whatever it is you need.”

JORDAN
took her face between his hands, kissed her.  Then stood so that she could get past him to the door. 

And after she’d gone, stood several moments longer, staring at the cigarette butt in her coffee.

JORDAN woke to the dark, and to tiny needles pricking his foot.  Hoping to restore circulation, he tried to wiggle his toes but found them pinned to Ava’s mattress.  He opened one groggy eye to locate the source of the problem. 

He and Ava weren’t alone on the bed.

“What is this, Dr. Doolittle?” he mumbled and gave Finn a reproachful look.  Sleeping on the bed was one of the few lines Jordan had drawn between himself and his dog, and from the sheepish way the animal glanced at him and then quickly looked away, Finn knew exactly what he was doing.

If he had to guess, Jordan would say Ava invited the dog up after Jordan had fallen to sleep.

So much for his authority. 

“Yeah, you know which side your bread’s buttered on, don’t you, you little traitor?”  Looking around, Jordan noted One-Eyed Jack glaring at him again from his outpost on the windowsill.

He guessed the menagerie was the price one paid for sleeping with a veterinarian.

Taking care not to disturb Ava, Jordan swung his legs off the bed and made a grab for his boxers, carelessly discarded along with the rest of his clothes when Ava had tucked him in with a bedtime story.

He was pretty sure he’d never heard that particular take on Sleeping Beauty when he was a kid.  Her suggestion for how the prince should wake the snoozing maiden was a hell of a lot more entertaining than the Disney version.

Glancing at her, huddled under both comforter and dog, he felt the tightening in his chest that had come to be so familiar in the short time he’d known her.

She’d brought the light, when so much of the past weeks had been dark.  And Finn, in a roundabout way, had brought her.  Serendipity, he mused, and ruffled the fur between the animal’s ears.  Yes, that was the perfect word for it.  He’d been looking for a veterinarian, and had found his heart instead. 

For that alone, he’d let his sleeping dog lie.

Heeding the call of his stomach, Jordan padded toward the kitchen.  Food had been more of an afterthought than a priority over the past week – certainly the past couple days – and suddenly he was starving.  Pitiful, he decided, after checking the contents of the fridge. Food obviously hadn’t been a priority for Ava recently, either.  Maybe they could make a run after work tomorrow, stock up for the weekend.

He’d enjoy that, he realized.  Sharing that sort of homey, domestic chore.  Handy, he thought, as he unearthed a jar of peanut butter, a box of crackers.  Since he hoped to work his way around to cohabitation in the not so distant future.

He peered out the window, scanned the street, saw nothing he deemed suspicious.  A light came on in the big house, and Jordan gathered Lou Ellen was up for the day.  He thought of the log she’d created for him, detailing most of the street’s vehicular traffic – and pithy observations regarding the same – over the course of the past week, and wondered if she slept in the first place.

The woman loved Ava.  That was obvious.  It was also obvious he’d earned her stamp of approval.  Seeing as she was the closest thing to family Ava seemed to have – he still wasn’t clear on what had happened to her parents, other than that her mother had died – Jordan guessed that was another plus in his column.

He remembered how wistful Ava had seemed, how sad, the night they’d sat in her clinic and talked of family.

He needed to get her over to his parents’, let her meet his.  Maybe Sunday dinner.  He’d talk it over with his mom.

Once he had, once he’d nudged Ava into that big, messy tangle of family ties, he figured she didn’t stand a chance. 

Grabbing a glass of water, Jordan balanced the rest of his booty in his arm and made his way back toward the living room.  Popping naked crackers for a hold-me-over, he sank onto the sofa and considered turning the TV on low. But it wasn’t yet six a.m.  Not only did he not care to disturb Ava, but figured his late night viewing choices to be infomercials and eighties sitcoms.

Dumping his armload onto the coffee table, he spotted the photo album.

Ah, blackmail time, he thought and dragged the album onto his lap.  Naked babies, prom dates from hell, really embarrassing fashion statements.

Good stuff.

It was full of Ava, as he’d hoped.  As a squished looking newborn, a messy one-year-old shoving her mouth full of Barbie cake.  Missed the boat there, he thought.   Ava was more… well, Dr. Doolittle than Barbie.  He smiled at her as a toddler, long brown pigtails blown into a sea swept tangle, constructing a castle out of sand – complete with a hermit crab sentry. 

Jordan slathered peanut butter on a cracker and turned the page.

Ava, resplendent in the white lace of a first communion, posed with a woman who had to be her mother.  The resemblance was strong, hair, build, smile – though Ava’s looked a little pained.  Jordan decided he wouldn’t be too happy either with that tiara on his head.

And there she was as a teen, surrounded by a litter of pups, laughing as they licked her face.    

“Jordan?”

He looked up to find Ava – fully grown – mussed and owlish in the doorway.  She was wearing his shirt, he noted, and felt the trickle of heat beneath his skin.  White against her dusky legs.  One lonely button holding it together.   The trickle turned into a flow.

Her big, brown eyes blinked heavily as she joined him on the couch.

“What are you doing?”

“Fuel.”  He held the box of crackers up and waggled it back and forth.  “I guess I should have crunched a little more quietly.  I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s okay.”  She shoved her hand into the box and rooted around until she produced a cracker.  “If you hadn’t gotten up, I probably would have, anyway.  We skipped dinner.”

“I’m not going to complain.”

She smiled, sleepy and smug, and pressed her lips to his.  “Me neither.”  Her smile faltered as she looked at the album on his lap.

Following the direction of her gaze, Jordan sat the crackers aside and flipped back to the picture from the day she was born.  “For someone who started life looking like a raisin, you turned out pretty well.”

“HA
ha.” Ava made an attempt to grab it from him, just playfully enough to keep him from guessing the panic he’d lit in her heart.

There were photographs of her father in there.  She doubted Jordan had cause to recognize Luis Martinez – currently under federal indictment on murder and racketeering charges – but it wasn’t a chance she wanted to take.

Jordan, whose reach was considerably longer than hers, held the album over his head.  “Come on now, sweetheart.  No need to be embarrassed.”  His dimples flashed in a teasing smile as he found a photo of her in a baby bathtub. “I’ve already seen you taking a bath in your birthday suit.  Although I have to admit you’ve improve
d a bit in the past twenty-eight
odd years.”

“Very funny.”  Ava feinted high, and when he dodged low, managed to get hold of the album.  She shoved it under the sofa.  “Next time we stay at your place so that I can rummage through your drawers.”

“Next time,” he agreed, kissing her head as she settled against him.

And Ava’s heart kicked, one hard beat, because she doubted there’d be a next time.

She had to cut him loose.

She’d lain awake for long hours after he’d fallen to sleep, trying to figure out a way out of the mess she’d inadvertently gotten herself into.  She owed Jordan the truth.  And it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide everything from him, the photo album being a case in point. 

But if she told him the truth, she risked not only her life, but his. 

Carlos’s little visit had made that clear. 

So the smartest thing, the safest thing, was to discourage him.  Or not only discourage him, she realized, but hurt him.  If she merely wounded his pride, he had enough tenacity to lick the wound, then take up the battle from a different angle. 

She had to do her best to break his heart. 

If he cared about her as he said he did, she figured she might just be able to do it.  Lord knew the thought of hurting him was enough to break her own.

But all things considered, it was better than
one or both of
them winding up dead.

Of course, knowing what she had to do, and finding the fortitude to do it were two different things entirely.  Here, in the dark, with his hand stroking over her hair as he fed them both crackers, she just wanted to sink in.  To take this little slice of time, this small window of happiness, for herself, and for him.

“Morning’s coming.”

Ava glanced out the window beside them, saw the first gray light that presaged dawn.  And thought, not yet.  Please, just a little longer.

Fighting the urge to close the blinds, to burrow in like a bear in hibernation, Ava laid her head on Jordan’s chest.

“I heard we might be in for some wicked weather late this afternoon,” he continued.  “But I’ve always liked a good storm.”

Until just recently, so had she.

Ava decided she’d write down everything she knew.  About her uncle’s business, about Jordan’s abduction – every detail she could come up with, however small.  She’d leave it in a safe deposit box and tell Carlos that if Jordan – or Lou Ellen and Katie, for that matter – were to meet with any accidents, if he ever had any unaccounted for bad luck, if any of the goons were so much as to sneeze in Jordan’s direction, she’d turn the information over to the DEA, the FBI, and anyone else who was willing to listen.

She’d spell it out in a will, leave the key with her father if something were to happen to her.  

But for now, she was going to steal this time before the day came. 

“How do you feel about taking those crackers and getting crumbs all over my bed?”

Jordan leaned forward to sit the box on the table.  And turning, slid those long fingers along her collarbone to brush her shirt – his shirt – aside.

As it fell, she watched his eyes heat, and pleasure speared through the pain.

“How about,” he slowly rolled her beneath him on the sofa “we skip the crackers and skip the bed, and enjoy the crumbs we have right here.”

HE had to take out the lawyer, too, Bobby Lee thought as he lowered his night vision goggles, and ran the back of his hand over his mouth.  Actually, the lawyer had become the main target.

Stupid.  Bobby Lee had been so stupid in the park that night.  Getting close enough to let the dog sense him, touching that can with his bare fingers, leaving his van parked on the street while he ran away like a goddamn girl.

But he hadn’t been expecting the gun.  The gun, or the way Wellington had just… crouched and rolled like some kind of ninja.  He was a lawyer, for chrissakes.

Turned out the guy was some kind of black belt.  Taught self
-
defense to a bunch of prissy bitches down at the Y.

But black belt or not, he’d gotten himself clobbered good, hadn’t he?  Yeah, Bobby Lee had done his research, and knew somebody else besides himself had a reason to want the assistant district attorney gone.

The man was a menace.  All that work Bobby Lee had gone to, to set up Elijah Fuller – who’d been nice enough to write what amounted to a confession on the wall of his cell, tying the whole thing up with a big, fat bow – and the stupid prosecutor… didn’t believe him.